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Men, sex, journalism, armageddon and radical papier-mâché: what I've been writing.

As you can see, I'm still in New York, I have a marvellous new hat, and here is another round-up post. This month I've been writing about, amongst other things, sex, politics, the future, nerd guns, protest policing and the mating rituals of the young and foolish in New York City. Here's the worst of the damage:

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My guest post on WarrenEllis.com about Journalism, Activism and Honest Reporting went viral - it's a piece that was very important to me, and was based on a speech I gave at Left Forum in March.

My review of William Gibson's new essay collection, 'Distrust That Particular Flavour', is up now at The New Inquiry. Almost certainly my favourite thing I've written this month:  The Future, Probably. 

Last week, I wrote for the Independent on men and their attitudes to sex, women and feminism - based on a survey I posted on this blog, which some of you were kind enough to help with. I'll be using those survey answers more in the future - stay tuned. 


The piece I wrote right here at this blog about Lena Dunham, Katie Roiphe, kink and the politics of oppression was widely read (and led to a very interesting discussion over at Metafilter!)


Two short pieces for the Independent's notebook section: one on Trenton Oldfield, the boat-race anarchist swimmer, and one on dating in New York, in which I am possibly slightly unfair to writers, Brooklynites and coffee-shop lurkers like myself. Please note that am not, nor have I ever aspired to be, Carrie fucking Bradshaw. 


And finally, this week's column on the run-up to Occupy Wall Street's planned May Day General Strike. 



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Incidentally, this month, which has involved me starting an exciting new job at The Independent, has also been full of more than the usual catalogue of attacks, rapebombing, slut-shaming, death threats, professional slanders, right-wing trolls, libertarian trolls, soi-disant radical trolls and mad people with vendettas, including former comrades, trying to push false stories about me into the gossip press. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes it does get difficult. Despite all this I've managed to keep producing, but that might not have been the case without the support of a lot of wonderful people, friends and colleagues and near-strangers. I am massively grateful to everyone who has offered me their solidarity over the past few weeks - you know who you are, and I hope you know that your efforts are more than appreciated. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you.

Chains of oppression: Katie Roiphe, Lena Dunham and the sexual counter-revolution.

(Image via The Daily Beast)

Things that Jean-Jacques Rousseau really liked included: the philosophy of universal liberty, and having young ladies spank him into a frenzy. In "The Confessions", he wrote: “To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments, and the more my blood was inflamed by the efforts of a lively imagination the more I acquired the appearance of a whining lover.”

Like a great many wealthy, important men throughout history, Rousseau was a humiliation slut. He loved to have women boss him around in bed. He was also a flasher, and liked to moon unsuspecting ladies in the street and then prostrate himself for punishment. Nobody has ever suggested that this meant that the great enlightement philosopher secretly wished men didn’t run the world. In fact, Rousseau had some very specific things to say about women’s place in the social order. “Woman was specifically made to please man," he wrote in "Emile." "If man ought to please her in turn, the necessity is less direct. His merit lies in his power...If woman is made to please and to be subjugated to man, she ought to make herself pleasing to him rather than to provoke him."

Kink has been part of the sexual menu for so long that it’s hard to pretend anyone is shocked anymore when it turns up on the table. The practice of male masochism, for example, has become almost idiomatic when one is discussing Wall Street workers, or the British aristocracy - despite Rousseau and De Sade, the French still refer to sadomasochism as ‘La Vice Anglais.’

At no point, however, has anyone implied that men who want to be sexually dominated by women also want to be dominated by them socially and economically. Quite the opposite, if the long history of powerful men paying poor women to beat them up in backrooms is anything to go by. Apparently, though, a few smutty books about naughty professors wielding handcuffs are meant to prove that modern 'working women' (sic.) aren’t really as into all this liberation schtick as we make out.

In a cover story for Newsweek, noted rape apologist Katie Roiphe argues that the recent success of pop-porn bestseller ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ proves that even feminists secretly want to be shagged into submission by great, big, whip-wielding brutes. Not just in spite of our feminism, but because of our feminism. Roiphe argues that modern "working women" - I'm sorry, was there ever a time when women actually did no work? - find “the pressure of economic participation... all that strength and independence and desire and going out into the world”...”exhausting.” Roiphe goes on to theorise, based on precisely one film, one tv show and one novel, that “for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.”

I’m not going to waste my time being mean to Roiphe, the unfortunate straw-lady who was encouraged to write this woeful piece of drivel. Suffice it to say that her piece says a lot more about the sadomasochistic relationship between female freelancers and their editors than it does about any other so-called ‘trend’. The article seems crafted to do one thing well, which is to make a lot of people angry, which, hella, it has: having supper with a dear friend and her girlfriend last night, I showed her the article on my phone, and was genuinely frightened for the device after she slammed it down and muttered, simply, "fuck you". But just because a piece of bait is obvious doesn’t mean it’s not worth a nibble. So let’s have a conversation - a real conversation - about what women want, and what that means.

The first thing to note is that sexual submission is is the acceptable face of female perversion: pliable, obedient and all about pleasing your man. Most of the available submissive fantasies that Roiphe and others have cited as part of a ‘trend’ insist on their protagonists’ initial unwillingness to be tied to enormous beds and rogered by wealthy professionals. In "Fifty Shades of Grey", the protagonist only acquiesces to the kink because she wants to please her dominant lover. In "The Story of O" - which, although hardly part of a ‘trend,’ having being written in the fifties, is still one of the only dirty books written for women that you can buy in respectable shops - ‘O’ agrees to be whipped and fucked by rich anonymous strangers to please her partner, Renee. These women may learn to love being spanked, but they certainly don’t seek it out: they are passive, rather than just submissive.

In real life, men and women enjoy being bossed around in bed for lots of reasons - sometimes it might be about being punished, sometimes it might be about working out personal baggage, sometimes it might be about taking the break from all the responsibilities you have outside the bedroom, and sometimes it might just be about wanting someone else to do the work. And sometimes, yes, it might be about wanting to experience sex without having to take responsibility for your own desires - it’s not as if we live in a culture where women who want to have sex are encouraged to have it in a shame-free way. Both Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight, the teen series the adult erotic novel was based on, are fantasies of pursuit, of the responsibility for sexual agency being entirely in the hands of a man, who desires the point-of-view-protagonist completely.

In a culture where women who express sexual agency are punished, humiliated and threatened with real rather than ritualised violence, that sort of fantasy is entirely comprehensible. What is more significant is that submission - alongside, from time to time, sex work - is the only kind of female sexual ‘unorthodoxy’ that is currently deemed worthy of discussion - unorthodoxy trussed up tight by the bondage tape of patriarchal expectations. Unorthodoxy that happens to involve fantasies of being dominated by men. Unorthodoxy practiced exclusively, if we go by the ‘examples’ Roiphe’s investigation turns up, by women who are young, and white, and straight, and middle-class, and, most importantly, fucking fictional.  

INCIDENTALLY - why is it that young, white, straight, middle-class, fictional women are  the only type of women that routinely interest the trendmaking mainstream press? And why is it that women are not permitted to be creative without having to speak for the entire condition of womankind? The most exhaustively discussed new cultural artefacts in recent weeks - 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and Lena Dunham's new HBO show 'Girls' - are being treated as if they were straight memoirs, rather than, in one case, a piece of redrafted fan-fiction based around a story that was originally about vampires? Is it because we don't believe that a woman can truly create fiction or write meaningfully without drawing entirely on her own experience? Is it because mainstream culture still lacks a language to talk about women's issues and women's lives that is not at once confessional and riddled with lazy stereotypes? Is it because most 'fictional' women are still created, cast and directed by men? Is it because we don't believe women can actually be artists? DISCUSS.

Anyway. Fantasies about pretty young white women being controlled, hurt and dominated by men have always been the the part of kink that nobody ever really had a problem with. During the crackdowns on the fetish and kink communities in the 1980s and early 1990s, submissive heterosexual women and their play partners were rarely targeted for prosecution. Today, when you think of ‘fetish’, many people think of Jean Paul Gaultier models strutting the runway in elegant leathers, and arty snaps of willowy girls doing Japanese rope bondage in low-lit loft apartments . You might not be quite so quick to picture middle-aged gay couples in matching latex, or enormous, hairy men called Nigel waddling around fetish clubs with joysticks up their bottoms and big grins on their faces, but kink has always been as much about them as it has been about the beautiful young girls, breakable or pretending to break others, who tend anyway to have less disposable income to spend on rubber.

Here are some non-standard sexual trends that editors at Newsweek, Glamour and Cosmopolitan are less keen to make headlines out of: poor women fucking. Black women fucking. Queer women fucking. Old women fucking. Fat women fucking, ugly women fucking, bossy, arrogant women fucking. Women who are dominant in bed. Women who like to penetrate men with big pink strap-ons. Women who want multiple sexual partners at once or in succession. Women who just want to go to bed early with a cup of tea, an Anna Span DVD and a spiked dildo the size of an eggplant. Here are some more: sex workers who want to be treated like workers, rather than social pariahs. men who want to get fucked. Men who are gentle and submissive in bed. Men who don’t enjoy penetrative sex. Men for whom sex is an overwhelming emotional experience. I guarantee you that all of these things go on, but any of them might actually destabilise for a second our cultural narrative of sex, gender and power, so none of them are allowed to be ‘trends’.

In truth, there has never been anything controversial about the fantasy of female submission. These days, most of the ‘mainstream’ pornography readily available online involves some variation on the theme of outrages against young, prone, fuckable females. The rituals of whips, leather and safe-words are not part of the language of ‘normal’ porn, but otherwise the horny prospect of prone pretty girls having violent sex done to them and learning to love it is a dialect of desire everyone understands - so much so that lots of young men grow up knowing no other box to put their lust in. In Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’, the protagonist’s useless hipster quasi-boyfriend spouts ‘dirty talk’ that Katie Roiphe identifies as specifically sado-masochistic - but actually, it could be lifted off the commentary on any ‘vanilla’ porn site. Check it out on RedTube.com if you don’t believe me. Actually, don’t. Actually, do.

Female sexual submission has never really been shocking. Right now, we are in the middle of a sexual counter-revolution. The backlash is on against even the limited amount of erotic freedom women have won over fifty years of hard campaigning: abortion and birth control are under attack, sexual health clinics are kitted out with bomb detectors and staffed by doctors who come to work wearing bullet-proof vests, and a fully-grown woman is denounced as a slut and a whore by male commentators across America by suggesting as part of a congressional hearing that yes, she may once or twice have had intercourse for pleasure rather than procreation. And until very recently, Rick Santorum, a man who considers contraceptives morally wrong, was a semi-serious contender for leader of the free world.

The sexual heresies that truly upset the pearl-clutchers of middle America have nothing to do with whips and chains. That’s just faux-outrage, a bit of editorial baiting designed to upset feminists and titillate everyone else who likes to get cross and horny over the idea of dirty little girls tied up with tape.

No, what really gets social conservatives angry still happens not in swanky fetish clubs, but behind the closed doors of abortion clinics. It’s women who want to be able to choose to terminate a pregnancy. Women who want to control their own fertility. Women who want sexual autonomy, which is what any attack on abortion rights is fundamentally about. Women who want to live independently or raise children without the help of men. Women who want sex on its own merit, whether it comes wrapped in black bondage rope or scattered with rose petals.

Female sexual autonomy itself is what’s really unorthodox today. Agency and self-determination, the right to own our own desire - those are the kind of forbidden fantasies women across the world still pant over in private, unable to pronounce for fear of being slut-shamed. As Rousseau might put it : “Whether the woman shares the man's desires or not, whether or not she is willing to satisfy them...the appearance of correct behavior must be among women's duties.”

In Syntagma Square....

"24
NOTES

The Tsolakoglou [a reference to a wartime Nazi collaborationist in Greece] government has literally wiped out my ability to survive, based on a decent pension which I paid for myself over 35 years with no help from the state.

If one Greek had taken a Kalashnikov into his hands, I might have followed him and done the same but because I am of an age that makes it impossible for me to take strong action on my own, I can find no other solution than to put an end to my life before I start sifting through garbage cans for my food.

I believe that young people with no future will one day take up and hang this country’s traitors in arms in Syntagma Square just as the Italians hanged Mussolini in 1945.

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The suicide note of 77-year-old Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in Syntagma Square, in protest against the austerity policies hitting Greece. Via Molly Crabs and everyone else. Not a lot to add, really. ETA: The funeral of Dimitris Christoulas erupted into an anti-austerity rally, the Telegraph reports.

Women, activism, anger, and other things I've been up to..

I write and publish a great deal these days, and sometimes, like this week, there'll be a publication run where pieces I'm reasonably proud of will come out almost every day. Not only do I not want the hard work I put into these articles to go to waste, you can get a better sense of where my politics are and what I'm interested in right now from looking at what I'm writing all in one place. So here are this week's offerings, which appear to be about feminism, trolling, the state of the left, personal and political revolution and Rush Limbaugh's terrible face.

So, it turns out that feminism is a CIA plot to undermine the left - blog for New Statesman. In which I encounter the American dudeleft and pull some strange faces in a New York bookshop. Video editing by Willie Osterweil.

Eating disorders and the White Strike - when youthful dissidence cannibalises itself - column for New Statesman. This was quite a personal piece and harder to write than I thought it would be. I could write a whole book on the topic, so getting to the point in 600 words was a good exercise.

A report from Occupy AIPAC - for The Independent. In which I go to Washington DC and watch peace activists pretend to be doing something new, and learn more about lobbying.

Sugar Daddies - for Salon.com. A report on the trend of older, rich men looking to pay financially desperate, 'non professional' women for sex, affection and maybe a bit of tidying. In which I troll the hell out of some creeps on the internet for fun and feminism.

Rush Limbaugh, Sexist Shit and the Art of the Decoy - a blog for New Statesman. Written mostly in a rage-fuge in the back of a friend's play, having just drunk some absinthe by accident (I can't have absinthe since that night in 2005 of which we do not speak). Features a metaphor about arses I'm quite pleased with.

Deeds, not Words: a column for International Women's Day 2012 - For the Independent. The effervescent Molly Crabapple did an illustration to go with this piece, which I am stupendously excited about, and you should all go to her Kickstarter and get involved in redefining gallery art for the 99% or some aesthetic revolution or other, I don't know, I'm all tuckered out after this week and should probably have more coffee absolutely right this minute.

Ciao, L

A love letter for London

In some ways it was the first place I ever knew. Seventeen, sick and living in a box-room belonging to an octogenarian friend of the family, every day once I was just about well enough not to have to sleep in hospital overnight I would wake up at five and tiptoe down the street and go underground. I've always thought of the London Underground as not quite of this world. It has its own newspapers and its own weather, its strange warm winds blowing from tunnels deep in the groaning belly of the city. Step out of the tube and you are older, by twenty minutes or a whole lifetime; you are different; you have left something of your old self, your anxious, night-time, dreaming self down in the racket and thunder of the trains and the harsh bright never-dawn of rolling rubbish and advertising hoardings.

I was born in London, and though my family moved away when I was small, I grew up longing for the city. Some of us do. The rabbit-bitten fields and sun-kissed cycle paths that my parents were so thrilled for their daughters to grow up with held no interest for me. I wanted the smell of diesel and the rain throwing up soot on the pavements. I wanted lights that never went out and streets to swagger down. I went to sleep in the owl-hooting dark, dreaming of the syphilitic rattle of urban pigeons.

More than anything, I wanted the tube. Every time we went to London for a visit, I could happily have ridden the underground all day. I wanted to lose myself in the dark and mouse-running scramble of crammed-together humanity and come up again in the light. I liked being one of the sardine people, even in rush hour, even at my height, which was and remains about armpit height on the average commuter. Late at night, the platforms echo with the memory of thousands of city dwellers huddled together for shelter with the bombs of the Blitz overhead. Catching the last Bakerloo line home, you can almost see them, out of the corner of your eye, through the cracks in history: propped against one another, mindlessly tired.

The tube is London's psychic sewer system. The somatic debris of life in a late capitalist megatropolis drifts through and drains away here down tunnels garish with adverts for car insurance and cosmetic surgery. Knackered commuters grip their seats or cling to the upright poles, avoiding one another's eyes. And yet it's also the one place in the whole county where the power of organised labour can and does bring a city juddering to a halt on a regular basis, the one place where workers, by and large, expect to be treated like dignified human beings. Tube strikes are as regular and marvellous and irritating as the yearly snowfall which turns London into a hushed, glittering white fairyland of treacherous ice and broken transport links and adults freaking out like excited toddlers, turning up their faces to catch the fat flakes before they soak into the grime.

London is a place of contradictions.

The process of living here is one big game of unseeing. I have not visited another world city where different lives mesh and interweave so intricately without ever touching, rich and poor. In China Mieville's novel 'The City and The City,' two cities occupy the same physical space, and citizens must avoid 'breaching' the psychic gap at all costs. When the book came out in 2010, there was much speculation as to what city it was supposed to represent - Belfast? Jerusalem? Berlin as was? - but for me it's clearly about London, consciously or unconsciously, the city of parts which breaks into all of Mieville's work, as it does with any writer who lives here for very long.

London is more than two cities. It is many cities. It is the city and the city and the city and the city, a delicate, dirty palimpsest of history layered on history. A city where kids with hoods and hopeless eyes can start burning police cars and looting the high streets and the question on the lips of the broadsheet writers and politicians who live and work a few streets away can still be: where the hell did these people come from?

They come from London, just like you.

I have been in love with this city all my life, and it has taken me on marvellous adventures and it has come close to crushing me. No lover has ever betrayed me like London. Being poor and homeless and despairing here is not like being poor and homeless and despairing anywhere else. I have seen this city swallow friends whole, chew down its young for the meat and life under the skin and spit them out old and traumatised. London does this. You plonk your youth like an offering on the steps of Liverpool Street Station and you just have to hope the city will leave you a life worth living as it slurps up the marrow of your dreams. I will never forgive it. I will never stop loving it.

But it's all got a bit much lately, what with the total policing and the hysterical run-up to the Olympics. I need a break, and I'm fucked if I'm going to the country. London and I need some time apart. I've saved up some money and I'm leaving today tooff to see other cities for a while, starting with New York, which is a great floozie of a town with a far inferior subway system. But I'll be back, because it'll take more than godawful tea and all-night cupcake shops to make me forget where I come from. I come from the best city in the world ever. I come from London.